Better long-term learning ability is predicted by higher surface folding of the human premotor cortex

Abstract

The capacity to learn enabled the human species to adapt to various challenging environmental conditions and pass important achievements on to the next generation. A growing body of research suggests links between neocortical folding and numerous aspects of human behaviour, but their impact on enhanced human learning capacity remains unexplored. Here we leverage multiple training cohorts to demonstrate that higher levels of premotor cortical folding reliably predict individual long-term learning gains in a challenging new motor task, above and beyond initial performance differences. Individual folding-related predisposition to motor learning was found to be independent of cortical thickness and several intracortical microstructural parameters, but dependent on larger cortical surface area. We further show that learning-relevant features of cortical folding occurred in close spatial proximity to practice-induced structural plasticity and were primarily localized in hominoid-specific frontal tertiary sulci. Our results suggest a new link between neocortical surface folding and human behavioural adaptability.